When Gabriel awoke the first thing he always seemed to notice was the silence. The morning silence that echoed over the mud flats was complex and layered. If it had been later in the day, the air would have been full of the sharp sounds of the village, the grinding of mortars on pestles, the calls of the mud crab peddler. If it had been late afternoon Gabriel would have been able to hear the sounds of the children playing in the mud pools, but in the morning there was none of this. There was just the mud, and the silence.
Shaking the sleep from his limbs, Gabriel slid out from between his parents and, pausing only to grab a piece of flat brown bread from the eating mat, slipped into the weak sunlight. Gabriel’s family hut was on the outskirts of the village, a little removed from the mass of metallic green huts that clung to the base of the wall. Out of a desperate need to break the visual monotony of the grey sky and brown mud, the villagers painted their huts with the garish metallic green blood of the mud crabs, coating drab mud walls and thatching with hundreds of crabs worth of blood. Turning away from the sight, Gabriel faced the expanses of the flats. Perfectly umber and studiously empty in every direction, the flat’s blandness belied the horrors they contained.
Gabriel had been weaned, like every other villagers, on stories of sink pits and the hut-sized mud crabs that hide just below the surface of the pools. Most people hated the flats, and avoided looking for too long at the unbroken grey horizon that surrounded the village for one hundred and eighty degrees. They hated the wind that carried the stench of a million billion flecks of rotting algae, the echoing howls that seemed to come out of nowhere in the middle of the night. These were the reasons every villager sighted as the things that drove them to hate the flats, but Gabriel knew the truth. The villagers hated the oppressive force of the flats, the sense of infinity that gave the impression that if the world flipped on its side, there would be nothing stopping the village from falling right off the edge. That was probably why, Gabriel mused, the villagers clung so desperately to the shadow of the wall. It gave them a sense of security and grounding that was otherwise geographically deprived them. The flats didn’t hold that fear over Gabriel; as wary as he was, some little part of him longed to throw his hands in the air and run screaming towards the rim of the world. A very small part.
The sounds of the village awaking behind him shook Gabriel out of his reverie. Taking a bite of his bread, Gabriel pulled a thin woven reed cord out of his pocket to measure the strength and direction of the wind. As the village’s kitemaker, he felt duty bound to constantly check the wind, ready at any time to begin pulling kites into the air. The string held almost horizontal by the force of the wind, Gabriel knew that hundreds of feet above them, the sky would be building into a tempest. When the mayor measured the wind this morning, she would declare the beginning of The Ascension. The plummeting temperature that proceeded storm season meant every villager knew when The Ascension was coming. The traditional attempt to flee before the onslaught of the storms meant every year a villager would take on the title of The Climber, and attempt to scale the wall, carrying the ceremonial rope to drop down to those who remained in the mud. The hut leveling, terror inducing, fury of the storms kept the villager’s fear of storm season alive. This fear kept The Ascension alive when so many other traditions were born, and died. As the years passed and climber after climber attempted to summit the wall, only to fall screaming to their death, fewer and fewer people began to volunteer, until the mayor was forced to select from the village’s unneeded and unloved to find a suitable climber.
Gabriel had turned to enter the hut when he heard the threads of the conversation between his parents and his younger brother, Michael. The question of who the mayor would select would be much debated in every hut in the village. Many people thought it would be the baker’s middle child, a tall boy, who had found the secret of making reed alcohol, and had discovered not only that he had a taste for the stuff, but that he was a violent drunk. Others thought that it might be the potter’s youngest girl, who had been caught breaking into the mayor’s grain cache. The debate over who was going to be sacrificed, and for what reasons, was a constant presence in the weeks leading up to The Ascension. Gabriel had no stomach for it. Every time he tried to chastise his family he had been rebuked. Gabriel’s brother was especially fervent in his discussion of the wall. Michael had become the object of fascination for a younger group of villagers that believed Michael was the reincarnation of Raphael, the first climber. Michael’s devotees followed him around like the very mud on which he stood was made of grain. The fame had gone to Michael’s head. The arrogant ass had started giving orders and making predictions to anyone who would listen. Michael was just a simple hut constructor, not something useful, like Gabriel. Just as he was about to push his way past the reed matt door in order to ask them to stop chittering like sun-mad mud crabs, Michael shoved past Gabriel, a humorous glint in his eye.
“Come, brother, pull your kites into the air. The Ascension is about to begin and we mustn’t allow our climber to make his or her bid for freedom alone.” The imperious cast of Michael’s voice was enough to make Gabriel flush with annoyance. Gabriel was the elder brother, what did Michael know?
Just as Michael had predicted, however, the sound of a mud crab shell horn echoed through the village, marking the beginning of The Ascension. For the first time that day, Gabriel turned to look at the wall. The uniform grey stone stretched out as far as the eye could follow in either direction. So tall that the villagers could not see the top, even on the clearest day, and so long that ranging parties sent to explore the wall’s length had come back empty handed. The stone was a perfectly unremarkable shade of grey, remaining cold regardless of the intensity with which the sun beat down upon it. The stone of the wall had become worn and rough with the passing storms, but without tools harder than a mud crab shell, the villagers had no hope of boring their way through. With the ferocity of the storms, no ramp could be made, no tunnel kept from filling with water. The implacability of the wall left only one option, to climb. On the coldest days in winter, when the dome of the sky reached the perfect hue of grey, the distinction between where the wall began and where the horizon ended became unclear, so that it felt like the heavens themselves had come to stand alongside the village.
The only obvious visual imperfection on the wall’s face was the mess of metallic green lines all starting from a single point and fanning slightly to create a column reaching a little more than half way up the wall. The lines were painted by the climbers as the ascended from the traditional starting point, so that, in the inevitable event of a climber’s fall, those who followed would have an idea of what paths had already been tried and what paths had yet to be proven deadly. For Gabriel, the sight of so many catalogued failures always evoked the feeling that a giant had fixed its giant eye directly on him.
His face trained skyward, Gabriel paused only to get his family’s kites airborne and tied off to the stone in front of their hut. Gabriel trotted towards the base of the wall, weaving through the clumps of villagers, stopping here and there to help people with their kites, or to join a group as they watched the climber make her plodding way up the face of the wall, marking, as she went, her progress with the brush of mud crab blood that she kept strapped to her side. It was Gabriel’s job to make sure that no climber went unaccompanied into his or her attempt to conquer the wall. There was a kite for every climber to have made the ascent. Each climber climbed with the support of those who had gone before him or her, so that, even when the villager’s cries of support were whipped away by the wind, they might have the strength of previous generations. At least that was the kite’s original purpose. Now it was mostly an excuse for young children to play far away from The Ascension’s inherent gore. When the final kite was airborne, Gabriel joined the crowd massed at the edge of the village closest to the wall, not wanting to go any further for fear of being struck by the climber’s falling body.
“Quiet! Everybody quiet! Give them room!” The voice of the village’s mayor broke through the clamor. “Quiet! Can’t you see these people are grieving?”
“You fat shit! Our baby was weak with the blight and your grain was lousy with rot! She was a good girl. A good girl.” The constricted voice of the potter was clear in the silence.
“Nonsense, we’re all in shock at the, uh, heroism of your daughter’s valiant attempt. You need space to process the enormity of this event.” She stood next to the parents, who knelt, clutching each other in shared misery, their eyes glued to the distant figure of their son on the wall. The mayor, a miraculously portly woman, had a voice that was just a little too high, and just a little too loud for pleasant conversation. As the only daughter of the family that controlled the village’s only grain mill, she owned the town’s access to bread. Tradition dictated that the village appoints someone who determined each families rations in order to keep the villagers in “climbing shape.” With a stranglehold on food in the village, the mayor’s appointment had been a foregone conclusion. The voice had proved almost as valuable an asset as her inheritance. The spine arching timbre of that voice made the mayor particularly effective. Gabriel personally thought that either the volume or the pitch, on their own, would have been fine. Together, however, the annoyances played on one another to create a voice that simultaneously scratched at the eardrums and demonstrated the Mayor’s idiocy without the burden of having to actually understand what she was trying to say.
The mayor sidled up to Gabriel.
“A new kite says she wont last another five minutes.” She placed a paw on his shoulder, as she whispered wetly into his ear.
Turning promptly on his heel Gabriel walked back into the maze of huts, the excited murmuring of the crowd filling his ears. After what felt like hours, the murmuring abruptly stopped. The air was filled with desperate screams, a soft thud abruptly leaving two voices to stand alone against the silence.
Gabriel sat in the center of the beaten earth floor of his family hut. There was no point in going back now, he knew exactly how the mayor would look as she waddled over to the small crater made by the young woman’s falling body. How the mayor would turn the body over unceremoniously to pull the unused anchor rope off of the corpse. How she would have to press the sole of her sandal into the crook of the climber’s armpit in order to get the leverage needed to pry the climbing brush from her rigamortised grasp. How she would present the brush to the climber’s parents, how she would try not to look too bored as the climber’s mother said the death rites in a voice ripe with grief and hatred for a tradition that had claimed yet another of her children. Gabriel knew this and hated his familiarity. He knew the process so well that he even recited the passages in time, praying that recitation could hold a truth beyond his ability to understand.
Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.
The words had been with the villagers for so long that they had lost almost all semblance of meaning. The villagers knew that they must have come from somewhere other than the flats, and that the rites must have also come from that place. Perhaps that was why they kept repeating them, even now. Sitting in the dirt of his families hut, listening to the keening cries echoing through the village, even after hearing the rites a dozens of times before, Gabriel found himself comforted.
As the sun passed in zenith, Gabriel forced himself to push the morning’s excitement aside, turning to the work at hand. A day of flying meant many replacement kites would be needed, and Gabriel began the arduous process of cracking open the shells of the mud crab, transforming their carapace and gastrointestinal tract into the frame and fabric of his kites. Gabriel reveled in the detail of his craft, the perfection. Finding the ideal form by observing how the mud crabs glided through the water, constantly tweaking, perfecting his process. Gabriel reveled in the ability to make something fly, to float easily upon the thermals, to escape the sucking hold of the muck and mud, to really see. It was something only found in the moments after a villager lost his or her grip on the wall.
Gabriel began to carefully fold the crab leather into the required form, but no matter how he tried to focus, the remembered weight of the mayor’s voice against his eardrum, talking about that little girl like a mud crab that the children had decided to bait, made Gabriel sick to the stomach. The Ascension had lost all hope of success decades ago. Now it was just a mud crab shell game, keeping the villagers focused on anything but their place. It wasn’t until Gabriel looked down that he noticed that, rather than delicately folding the thin crab leather into the desired shape, he was absent-mindedly tearing the expensive hide into increasingly small pieces. Throwing the ruined material to the side, Gabriel pawed at his face, the tension in his arms made his fingers clumsy, the muscles in his back unable to relax enough to stop the pounding in his head.
“It’s ok to be upset, brother.” Michael stood in the hut’s entrance, the afternoon sunlight forming a halo around his head. “It’s ok to mourn those who have fallen in our quest for ascension,” Michael made a broad, sweeping gesture as if addressing a congregation.
“Don’t be a crab. There’s no war, there’s no one to fight,” the words sounded raw and choked coming out of Gabriel’s disused throat.
“Open your eyes, Gabriel. We didn’t build this wall. We didn’t trap ourselves on this accursed swamp. They are keeping us from something. They are keeping us from the land of richness and plenty.”
“They? Who are they? There’s no one out here but us. Us and the crabs.”
“The one on the other side of the wall, Gabriel. Use sense. They simply watch us down here, amused by our stupid attempts to escape, to leave this hell.”
“No one is watching us. The wall is impossible to climb, everyone with a crab’s turd worth of sense can see that.”
“It only takes one, Gabriel, it only take one,” Michael gave his most knowing smile, turned gracefully about, and sauntered off, humming a tune that Gabriel couldn’t quite place.
The gossip spread through the villagers like fire through dried mud flat reeds. Another ascension had come and gone and the baker’s son had received his death rites. The conversations that consumed every household took on dream-like uniformity. Everyone seemed to know that Michael, the reincarnation of Raphael, had discovered a secret, had found the secret way to the top of the wall. Every villager seemed to know that very soon, the village’s salvation was imminent. The only question that became up for debate was how soon, “very soon,” was. With relief so immediately tangible, rumors began to appear about what awaited the villagers on the other side of the wall. Fields of shorts, soft reeds, rivers of milk, and docile mud crabs with sweet meat all became popular theories. The longing only made Michael all the more focal.
Gabriel felt like a gargantuan mud crab had him firmly by the ankle, and was slowly pulling him below the surface. His parents had always made sure that both he and his brother were not climb-eligible, that they were useful members of the village. This should not have been happening. He shouted and raved, telling Michael that he was too young, too weak, too bold for his own good. But Michael only laughed, saying, “When is a better time than now? The wall will not change, but I am strong, I have the wall on my side.” After a brief conversation with the mayor, Gabriel’s parents, too, lost their objections.
“Gabriel, now is the best time. The wall doesn’t change, but Michael is strong, he has the wall on his side.” It was maddening. Only when he grabbed Michael by the front of his shirt and threatened to drown him in mud crab dung did Michael reveal his secret.
“ In the overturned mud from the storm, I found a gift from Raphael, Gabriel.” Michael pulled a piece of silver piece of bone from the pouch at his side. It was sharp at one end and as heavy as the stone of the wall. “With this I can break into the wall and keep myself from falling. Raphael has provided our salvation.” The manic glint of Michael’s eyes quelled Gabriel’s protest. What was Gabriel to do in the face of Raphael’s intervention?
When the warbling not of the mud crab horn broke through the early morning air of late summer, Gabriel did not wheel about and run for the wall as he had done countless times before in previous years. He took a thin woven reed cord out of his pocket, watching it flutter to and fro in order to gauge wind strength and direction. Gabriel let the sound break over him, tilting his head back so that gravity could stop what his will power could not. Breaking from his revere, Gabriel turned and made his way back to the freshly abandoned hut. Choosing from the dozen models he had prepared and stowed in the thatch for this moment, Gabriel carefully pulled a brand new kite into the air. He wasn’t going to contribute to Michael’s martyrdom, but he’d be damned if he sent his brother up there alone.
When the next Ascension Day arrived the villagers were not sure what to do. There was no protocol for success. Did the absence of a body falling out of the grey expanse of sky mean that The Ascension was over? They had checked within a day’s travel in every direction. Michael hadn’t simply been blown off course during his fall. He had succeeded. He had ascended. Tradition taught the villagers that when someone ascended, they would escape. The question people began to ask themselves became, “are the mud flats the place we were being saved from or the place we have been delivered to?”
The storms came and went, and The Ascension celebration was the only notable absence. The village’s huts were rebuilt, of course, but as the seasons passed, villagers slowly forgot to repaint them, leaving the village almost undistinguishable from its surroundings. The conversations shared over breakfasts of flat brown bread and cold, sour, mud crab meat grew in variety and decreased in volume until every person in the village walked about with a perpetual stoop, as if leaning in to hear a child’s whisper. The villagers stopped telling stories of hut sized mud crabs, and invisible sinkholes deep in the flats. It became not unusual for villagers to spend increasing amounts of time staring out into the flat’s expanses; only to be roused when hit particularly hard on the shoulder, at which point they would apologize and return to whatever task they had abandoned. The village’s mortality rate had never been lower.
Looking away from this dreary scene, Gabriel finished tying the line of a kite to the stone in front of his family home and slowly straightened up, craning his head to look into the sky. The kite was new and the wind was strong; it would be visible for miles in every direction. Hunching his shoulders and screwing up his eyes, Gabriel turned to look at the wall, his eyes tracing the single green line painted a little off to the side of the mess of thorny green routes extending from the ceremonial starting place. With the taste of blood in his mouth, the weight of the climber’s rope over one should, the pouch of mud crab blood strapped to his thigh, and a brand new climbing brush taken in a white-knuckle grip, Gabriel started off towards the wall, winding his way through the ramshackle huts.
There are no birds that wheel and soar above the flats, but if there had been, on that day in the late summer, they would have observed an incredible sight. The seemingly endless stretch of mud, broken only by a wall of unimaginable height, stretching into infinity. Over the random scattering of huts at the base of the wall, five hundred and fifteen metallic green kites weave as though waiting for the chance to cut their earthly tethers and summit the monolith that they face. At the head of this airborne host, a single blood red kite of unique design hangs on a thermal of fetid wind, watching a single figure make his way up the wall. From a distance, the tendril over which he climbs would look like a proud tower of glittering emerald, the only spot of color in the entire world. The figure paints a path of metallic green that follows and intertwines with a separate, solitary path, set a little apart from the mess of green vines reaching for the sky. If the birds flew close enough to the climbing boy, they might have been able to hear, above the whistling of the wind, him humming a tune that can’t quite be placed. Most likely they simply would have heard what he heard. The sound of five hundred and sixteen companions crying out their adulation for his sacrifice.
Kitemaker
By Jack Tarlton